John R. DelaneyCanary All-In-One Home Security DeviceThe Canary All-In-One Home Security Device keeps tabs on your home with 1080p video capture and sensors for air quality, humidity, and temperature, but you'll have to pay extra to use many of its features.

Many features require a subscription plan. No local storage. Lacks native support for IFTTT.

Bottom Line

The Canary All-In-One Home Security Device keeps tabs on your home with 1080p video capture and sensors for air quality, humidity, and temperature, but you'll have to pay extra to use many of its features.

The Canary All-In-One Home Security Device ($169) is more than just an indoor security camera. Armed with multiple sensors and a 1080p camera, it records events when motion is detected, delivers crisp live streaming video to your smartphone, and monitors air quality, humidity levels, and temperature in your home. It also uses geofencing to arm and disarm itself so you don't have to. However, it doesn't offer dedicated support for IFTTT applets, and you'll have to pay for a membership plan to see more than the last 24 hours of recorded video and to take advantage of several features including two-way audio, desktop streaming, and incident reporting. While its feature set has expanded since we first reviewed the camera in 2015, it lags behind newer options like our Editors' Choice, theiSmartAlarm iCamera Keep Pro.

Design, Features, and Plans

Available in black or white, the Canary is a sleek 0.87-pound cylinder that measures 6 inches high and 3 inches in diameter. The front has a glossy black panel that holds a 1080p camera with a 147-degree viewing angle, a 3X zoom, and 12 infrared LEDs that provide night vision with a range of up to 25 feet. By way of comparison, the iCamera Keep Pro has a 1080p camera with a 140-degree viewing angle, but it offers mechanical pan and tilt that swivels the camera enclosure 350 degrees when panning and 40 degrees when tilting.

At the rear of the device you'll find an Ethernet port, a micro USB power port, and a port used for creating a secure connection between the camera and a smartphone. The bottom of the camera sports an LED ring that blinks red when it is searching for a network connection, and glows solid red when the camera is offline. A solid green light indicates that the Canary is armed, and a yellow light means it is disarmed. Under the hood are temperature, humidity, and air quality sensors, an ambient light sensor, a motion sensor, a 90dB siren for scaring off would-be intruders, and an 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter for connecting to a wireless network. There's also a microphone and speaker array for two-way audio, but you can't use this feature unless you pay for a membership plan (more on this later).

The Canary offers support for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice commands. For example, you can view live video on an Echo Show or Fire TV device, or ask your Google Home to give you the temperature or humidity levels in whatever room the Canary is monitoring. It also uses an algorithm that allows it to recognize when a person has caused a motion alert, as opposed to a small animal or a passing car. Missing are email and text message notifications, and dedicated support for If This Then That (IFTTT). However, it does work with the Wink Hub and will interact with other devices that are part of the Wink ecosystem.

The Canary can be accessed and managed from anywhere using a free Android or iOS app, and there's a web app that lets you view live video, but as with the two-way audio feature, you'll have to pay to use it. The app opens to a main screen that shows the name of the camera with a Watch Live button in the middle of the screen that opens a live stream. The video takes up half the screen in portrait mode and goes full-screen in landscape mode. At the bottom of the screen are buttons to sound the siren, enable two-way talk, and place an emergency call (you enter your emergency number in the settings menu).

Below the Watch Live button are current temperature, humidity, and air quality readings. Tapping any reading launches a chart that displays levels throughout the day. The air quality chart gauges the air as Normal, Abnormal, and Very Abnormal, based the amount of contaminants present, including hydrogen, carbon monoxide, ethanol, cigarette smoke, and cooking odors. You can configure the Canary to send notifications when certain thresholds are out of range.

Near the bottom of the main screen is a button for enabling Away, Home, or Night modes, and an icon that tells you the current status (Home or Away). Tapping the Home/Away button takes you to a screen where you can toggle between modes. At the very bottom of the screen is a View Timeline button that lets you view a history of all events with video thumbnails and time stamps. Tap the three bars in the top right corner of the main screen to view Membership and Device settings. The Membership screen is where you go to sign up for a Membership plan, edit your address, and configure a geofence perimeter that determines when your phone's location will automatically enable Home or Away modes. Here you can also enter emergency numbers.

In Devices you can add a new Canary device (including the Flex or View), configure network settings, create a Night mode schedule, and configure Home mode settings. There's Auto-Mode Switching that uses geofencing to arm the Canary when you leave the perimeter of your home (around 500 feet) and disarms it when you return, and options to configure Home and Night mode settings. For Home mode you can turn off Live Watch (it's on by default) and turn on the Record Video feature (it's off by default), but to enable recording in Home mode, you have to subscribe to a membership plan. Use the Notifications settings to adjust motion sensitivity, set HomeHealth alert thresholds (temp, air quality, humidity), enable notifications when the camera loses connectivity, and invite other users so you will receive Presence notifications when they enter and leave the geofence perimeter.

Motion-triggered recorded video is stored in the cloud, as there is no local storage option. The Canary comes with a free Basic Experience plan that gives you access to the past 24 hours of recorded video (30-second clips), live streaming from the mobile app, and a one-year warranty. The $9.99/month, $99/year Complete Experience plan gets you 30 days of recordings, full-length video that begins when motion is detected and ends when motion is no longer detected, unlimited downloads, access to the two-way talk feature, the ability to stream live video from the web app, and a two-year warranty. It also grants access to Canary's Incident Support Services, which connects you to a live agent who will walk you through the process of retrieving video of an event.

Setup and Performance

Installing the Canary is a snap. I downloaded the app and created an account using my email address and mobile number, and tapped Setup Canary Now. I was asked to allow the app to access location services and to enter my home address. Next, I plugged in the Canary and told the app where it is located (front door, back door, hallway, kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom, office, custom) and how it will connect to the internet (Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable). It immediately found my Wi-Fi SSID and asked for its password. Then I connected the yellow security cable to the Canary and the audio port on my smartphone and hit Next to establish a secure connection between the two devices, which took around one minute. To complete the installation, the Canary went through an update and a verification process, which took around five minutes.

In my tests, the Canary delivered sharp 1080p streaming video, recorded daylight video with bold colors and good contrast, and delivered well-lit black-and-white night vision video with excellent image detail. The motion sensor worked well once I adjusted the sensitivity to 5 (out of 10), and push notifications arrived instantly. The Auto-Mode Switching (geofencing) worked without fail, switching to Away mode when I traveled a few blocks away from home in either direction, and back to Home mode when I returned.

The motion sensor did a good job of differentiating between motion caused by people and motion caused by my cats, but every so often it would identify motion triggered by my dog as motion triggered by a person. I had no trouble viewing live video on an Amazon Echo Show, and although the siren isn't quite as loud as the 105dB siren built into the Icontrol Networks Piper NV, it is certainly loud enough to scare off any intruders.

Conclusions

Live on-demand video, sharp 1080p footage, and instantaneous mobile alerts are all good reasons to consider the Canary. It installs in minutes and keeps tabs on humidity levels, room temperature, and air quality in your home, and it lets you download and delete recorded video. It has a reasonably loud siren and a motion sensor that knows when a person is detected, and it will automatically arm itself when you leave the house.

That said, many of its features, including two-way audio, recording in Home mode, Incident Support, and access to more than one day's worth of recordings, require that you sign up and pay for a membership plan. If you can live without air, temperature, and humidity sensors, consider the iSmartAlarm iCamera Keep Pro instead. It offers mechanical pan and tilt, time-lapse recording, on-board video storage, free cloud storage, and direct support for IFTTT applets that allow it to work with other smart home devices. The Canary has improved since it was first released, but the competition has only gotten stronger.

Canary All-In-One Home Security Device

Bottom Line: The Canary All-In-One Home Security Device keeps tabs on your home with 1080p video capture and sensors for air quality, humidity, and temperature, but you'll have to pay extra to use many of its features.

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About the Author

As a Contributing Editor for PCMag, John Delaney has been testing and reviewing monitors, TVs, PCs, networking and smart home gear, and other assorted hardware and peripherals for almost 20 years. A 13-year veteran of PC Magazine's Labs (most recently as Director of Operations), John was responsible for the recruitment, training and management of t... See Full Bio

Canary All-In-One Home Security...

Canary All-In-One Home Security Device

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